Slugs' Saloon

Overview

Gritty, pre-cabaret-license bar between Avenues B and C where avant-garde and hard-bop jazz found a home from 1964 to 1972, Sun Ra held a Monday residency, Albert Ayler played his most documented set here, and Lee Morgan was shot and killed at the bar on February 19, 1972.

Slugs' Saloon occupied the ground-floor retail space of an 1873 tenement at 242 East 3rd Street, between Avenues B and C, in what was then a poor, multi-ethnic neighborhood (Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans, Poles) under pressure from heroin, poverty, and an early wave of bohemian artists. Robert Schoenholt, a Beat writer and Zen Buddhist ex-journalist, and Jerry Schultz, an improvisational actor, each put in $5,000 in 1964 to take over what had been a Ukrainian bar, naming it after Gurdjieff's 'terrestrial three-brained beings' (slugs) from Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, both owners belonged to the same Gurdjieff study group. New York regulations promptly prohibited the word 'saloon,' so the name shifted to Slugs' in the Far East, a wry nod to its deep-east address. The room was a glorified hallway: bar running left as you entered, a narrow bandstand against a brick wall at the rear with an upright piano (described by musicians as perpetually out of tune), small tables filling the rest. Capacity was nominally 75; on key nights it held twice that. Live jazz began in early 1965, catalyzed by Jackie McLean, who lived nearby on the Lower East Side with his wife Dollie and their children. McLean had lost his cabaret card after a drug conviction and was working as a music director at a halfway house, Slugs' operated without a cabaret license, which paradoxically made it the only room in the neighborhood where he could legally play. His Sunday afternoon sets drew musicians from the surrounding blocks: Kenny Dorham, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Pharaoh Sanders, and Charles Lloyd all performed in the early going. Sun Ra and His Astro-Infinity Arkestra took up a Monday-night residency from March 1966 through late 1967, then continued to play irregularly; the six-CD set Live at Slug's Saloon (Transparency, 2009) preserves cassette recordings from two nights in 1972, the final year. Albert Ayler recorded his most celebrated live document here on May 1, 1966, his quintet with Donald Ayler on trumpet, Michel Samson on violin, Lewis Worrell on bass, and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, released by ESP-Disk on the LP Slugs' Saloon (1982, Italy) and later reissued. Art Blakey, Charles Tolliver, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Booker Little, Tony Williams, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, and Jack Bruce (post-Cream, July 1969) all passed through the narrow bandstand. Poet Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and painter Bob Thompson frequented the room; Charles Simic, writing in the New York Review of Books in 2015, recalled Ornette Coleman's Sunday sets in terms of devotional shock. The no-cabaret-license model, far-east address, sawdust floors, and rough neighborhood made Slugs' both accessible and peripheral, musicians earned around $50 a night; audiences came exclusively for the music. A second, deeper stage with a baby grand was eventually added to accommodate larger ensembles. The club doubled as a de facto rehearsal room for the Arkestra and as an after-hours gathering point for musicians who lived in the surrounding tenements. Milan Simich, a regular, described it to Simic as 'a dangerous place, lots of muggings and fights.' Wealthy patrons occasionally arrived by limousine; water-filled milk cartons were dropped from upstairs apartments onto the sidewalk below. On the early morning of February 19, 1972, during a blizzard, trumpeter Lee Morgan (33 years old, midway through a performance) was shot near the heart by his common-law wife Helen Moore following a confrontation during a break. The ambulance was delayed by the storm; Morgan bled out on East 3rd Street and died before reaching a hospital. Moore spent a short time in custody, returned to North Carolina, and died of a heart condition in 1996; Kasper Collin's documentary I Called Him Morgan (2016) reconstructed the relationship from a 1996 tape-recorded interview with Moore shortly before her death. Slugs' closed in late 1972, roughly a year after Morgan's death, following Jerry Schultz's departure, Robert Schoenholt, who had stayed on alone, died in 2012. The building survives at 242 East 3rd Street; as of the early 2010s the ground-floor space was occupied by Rossy's Bakery Café.

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